Kahawa

by Donald E. Westlake

  After the meal and the singing, Lew was fitted for his coffin. His legs and torso were wrapped around in a white sheet, and then three of the men lifted him up and laid him ever so gently on the pink quilting; which turned out to be a lot thinner than it looked and which was tacked onto extremely hard and uncomfortable wood. (The customary occupant, of course, wouldn’t be expected to complain.)

  Four or five of the women then set about painting his face and hands, using lipsticks and soot from the kerosene lanterns and leftover sauce from one of the chicken dishes and various other things he didn’t want described too clearly. They all had a wonderful time with the project, laughing and telling each other jokes in Swahili, clapping their hands at particularly grotesque accomplishments, and generally having great fun at his expense.

  Somebody offered to find a mirror so Lew could see the transformation for himself, but he said no. He could see what his hands looked like, which was precisely like the hands in the final painting of Dorian Gray in that old movie, and that was enough for him. “I’ll have to live with this face the rest of my life,” he told them. “I don’t want too many scary memories associated with it.”

  At the end, the bishop gave Lew two items: a two-foot-long stick, for propping up the coffin lid so he could get air on the journey, and a small lumpy package wrapped in aluminum foil. “That’s the cheese,” the bishop said, handing it to him as though it were radioactive. “Don’t open it before we get there.” A horridness seemed to hover around the little package, a tiny but virulent little demon, perhaps the assistant devil in charge of all the world’s tooth decay. Lew put it down gently on the quilt beside his left hip, propped the lid open with the stick, folded his hands, and was carried in his coffin up the stairs from the basement and out to the waiting hearse, a battered old vehicle of the same vintage as his pickup, and lacking glass in its back window.

  Hushed good-byes were combined with hushed giggles, and the last he saw of Bishop Kibudu’s flock, the men were waving and the women were blowing kisses and they were all laughing. The bishop drove, Father Njuguna presumably followed in the pickup—in what strange ways it had gone from minister to minister—and soon they had left Bugembe behind.

  The partition between the driver’s compartment and the business space contained a sliding panel, which the bishop left open, but there seemed very little to say beyond Lew’s expressions of gratitude and the bishop’s assurances that it was nothing at all. “You have a wonderful congregation,” Lew said.

  “Magnificent people. They keep me going.”

  Lew suspected it was the other way around, but he didn’t say so.

  The little foil-wrapped package was making its presence felt; or smelt. The bottom of the bottommost cistern in Calcutta; an elephant graveyard on a hot day; the interior of a freezer after a three-week power failure; those were some of the images that came into Lew’s mind as the hints and tendrils came into his nose, and the damn thing wasn’t even open yet.

  “This is Jinja,” the bishop said. “Not much longer now.”

  “I’m set.” Though he wasn’t, really; it suddenly occurred to him that the winding sheet effectively separated him from the pistol under his shirt. Had that been deliberate on the bishop’s part? Well, if things went wrong up ahead, a pistol wouldn’t help much anyway.

  “Bridge ahead,” the bishop announced. “Open the package now, and close your lid.”

  “Right.”

  Lew opened the package, and his nostrils slammed shut. His hair curled, his lungs became corrugated, his tongue died, his teeth shriveled and went back up into his gums. The skin under his eyes turned to leather. His ears fell off.

  Close the lid? With himself in here with that? Turning his head away, hoping in vain for fresh air, Lew gulped in a full breath, tucked the reeking package in against his left leg under a fold of the winding sheet, removed the propping stick and slid it under his right leg, closed his eyes like a proper dead person, and lowered the lid.

  Yug.

  Then, after an eternity, they opened the lid, which gave him at least a memory of fresh air, but with great alacrity they slammed it shut again, and down inside there Lew began counting. At five hundred he would turn himself in…

  Two forty-seven … two forty-eight … The hearse started slowly to move, but Lew continued to count, and had reached two sixty-one when the bishop’s voice came faintly through the lid: “All right, now.”

  “Nggaaaaaahhh!” Lew flung back the lid, sat up, grabbed the little package, and hurled it through the glassless rear window.

  Laughing, the bishop said, “If any pedestrian saw you sit up like that, he must have fainted.”

  “The cheese’ll bring him around,” Lew said unsympathetically.

  Farewells were said in the darkness behind a closed general store in Njery, the first little town on the west side of the Nile, less than two miles from the bridge. Fortunately, it seemed that the winding cloth had absorbed most of the cheese odor; unfortunately, it was the only thing he could use to wipe the death mask from his face. “I explained you were a plague victim,” the bishop said, while Lew cleaned himself up. “And that we’d had to wait two weeks for official permission to bury you.”

  Father Njuguna, standing to one side, smiling, hands clasped before him, said, “The life of an adventurer must be a very interesting one.”

  “I don’t know,” Lew said. “Not if traveling with that dead cheese was a high point.” Then he shook hands with both men, thanked them again for their help, and asked them to repeat his thanks to their parishioners. The bishop said, “May God bring us together again, under less exciting circumstances.”

  “Amen.” Lew held the bishop’s hand in both of his. “I’d say ‘God bless you,’ but why would He take my word for it? Besides, it’s clear He already has. May Uganda get healthy enough to deserve you. Good-bye.”

  On the outskirts of Kampala, a golf course lay beside the road on the right. Lew, driving properly in the left lane, the time well after midnight, the road very sparsely dotted with other traffic and completely free of pedestrians, glanced across at the golf course, the smooth curling fairways, the triangular flags limp on their poles at the greens, the swimming pool-shaped sand traps, and it surprised him to realize that of course there must be people in Kampala who used that golf course, who came out in the sunlight, well fed, well dressed, blessed with leisure time and money, and spent a pleasant afternoon knocking the little white ball around the course. In any society, no matter how repressive, how terrible, how awful the things done, there are always those people who remain untouched, who live their comfortable easy lives in the middle of horror and death, as though absolutely nothing untoward is going on.

  Lew was startled from his reverie by an astonishing sight in his headlights: across the way, a black Toyota was stopped at the verge, headlights off but running lights on. Several men—three or four men—were wrestling with a slender attractive well-dressed girl; all were African. Seeing Lew’s lights, they grabbed the girl up bodily and ran away with her, out onto the golf course.

  It wasn’t his business. He couldn’t even be sure who were the good guys and who the bad. He had troubles enough of his own. He yanked the pickup across the road, trying to find those running figures in his dim headlights, failed, and finally slammed to a stop in front of their car.

  A Toyota. License plate starting with UVS. In his lights the men had been garishly dressed. They and their car were exactly like the men and the car when he’d been arrested.

  Lew slapped off the pickup’s lights, jumped out onto the ground, unlimbered the pistol from under his shirt, and trotted off into the darkness.

  It was easy to follow them; the girl was screaming bloody murder. The rolling land in this blackness was a little tricky underfoot, but he didn’t have a lot of fighting girl to contend with and could make better time than they could.

  Had they heard him coming, or could they see him against the dim light from the roadway? One of them was s
uddenly standing in front of him, looking very severe, absolutely secure in his power and authority, barking something in Swahili that was probably along the lines of mind-your-own-business.

  Hardly slackening stride, Lew lifted his gun hand in a fascist salute. The man stared, following the pistol upward, and Lew kicked him in the crotch, then gun-butted him on the back of the head as he doubled over. One down.

  They had stopped up ahead, on one of the greens. Lew trotted forward; the girl screamed; there came the sound of repeated slapping. “Let her go!” he yelled, and fired a shot in the air.

  Astonishment. Silence. Even the girl was silent, but when he came closer he could see her alone on the green near the flag, on her knees; struggling groggily to rise, she only fell over.

  Lew reached her, went down on one knee, and said, “Miss? Do you speak English?”

  “If you’re my guardian angel,” she answered, gasping, face down on the cropped grass, voice bitter, “oh, boy, are you late.”

  “I’ve got wheels over there. Can you—”

  A shot rang out. Lew dropped flat beside her. “They don’t give up easy,” he said.

  “Get away from here,” she told him. Her face, when she turned toward him, was beautiful, but ravaged by strain. “Don’t buy trouble, don’t—”

  “Hush,” he told her. “Let me listen.”

  “They’ll kill you. They’ll kill you right here.”

  “Hush!”

  She hushed. He lifted his head to listen, looking left and right. Just beside them, the flag lazily moving in a slight breeze read 16. Looking at it, he laughed out loud.

  A pair of shots were fired, apparently at the sound of his laughter. The girl stared at him as though he were crazy. “That’s what I’ve been needing,” he explained, gesturing at the flag.

  She shook her head. Apparently she didn’t know whether she was more afraid of the Research Bureau men or of her rescuer. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The flag. All through this deal something’s been missing, and that’s it. Now I know what I’m fighting for. Green sixteen.”

  “I’ve been saved by a lunatic,” she said. She worked hard at being cool, but her voice trembled. “Mister,” she said, “terrible things have happened to me tonight. Don’t make fun.”

  Out there in the darkness, voices shouted to one another. “I’m sorry,” Lew said. “I’ve been under a certain amount of pressure myself. Now, those boys may attack. Or they may just try to stay between us and the road. On the other hand, I want to get behind them so I can finish them off, because their vehicle is a lot better than mine. Do you know why I’m telling you this?”

  “No.”

  “Because I’m going to need your help. I can see you’re bright and quick-witted, so even though you’ve been through a lot, it would help if you could avoid hysteria.”

  She was considerably calmer already. “I thought you were the hysteric,” she said.

  “That’s just my outgoing personality. Now, what you do, you lie here and talk to me. Can you do deep voices?”

  Sounding like a girl foghorn, she said, “Like this?”

  “Use it sparingly. See, I’m going out there and deal with those fellows, and in the meantime you stay here and hold a conversation.”

  “So they’ll think you’re still here. I get it.”

  “Right. See you soon.”

  He started away, but she said, “Wait a minute! What if they come here?”

  “Holler.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  Lew crawled down over the edge of the green onto the shaggier grass of the fairway. Another shot sounded from out there, followed by an angry yell from another direction. Lew wriggled rapidly along the ground on elbows and belly and knees, while behind him the girl said, “If you don’t mind a question, how long ago did you escape from the mental home?” Foghorn voice: “Just today.” Own voice: “And is it true you’ve been running President Amin’s foreign policy all these years?” Foghorn voice: “No, he does that himself.”

  The men up ahead were arguing. Without knowing the language, Lew could still guess that one faction wanted to rush the sixteenth green right now, while the other faction wanted to wait until dawn, or possibly send for reinforcements, or whatever.

  They were undisciplined and poorly trained. They kept jumping up and moving around, shouting to one another, silhouetting themselves against the running lights of their own car in the background. Lew crawled around their right flank, came up behind his first choice, took his knife out of its sheath in his boot, waited till the man finished yelling a sentence about something or other, and then put him away. A search revealed two handguns but no car keys.

  On his way to number two, Lew came across the fellow he’d hit at the beginning, who was just sitting up, rubbing his head, and thinking about taking part. Lew dispatched him and crawled on.

  The next man was even more active than the first, probably more nervous. In the distant blackness the girl continued her inane conversation. Lew approached his man, knife in right hand and pistol in left. The fellow turned, saw him, and at once attacked, shrieking and swinging his pistol barrel at Lew’s head.

  Lew stepped inside the swing, drove the knife up and across, and stepped out of the way to let the man fall. Then he went on to the last one, who was calling questions, getting no answers, and becoming too nervous.

  Far too nervous. Before Lew could reach him, he made a dash for the car. Discarding the knife, Lew dropped to prone position on the fairway, arms stretched out in front of himself, left hand palm up on the stubby grass, pistol butt cradled in that palm, right hand holding the grip, finger squeezing back gently on the trigger as he sighted on those Toyota lights. Sooner or later, his man would cross them.

  He did. Lew fired twice, and the man dropped.

  He was tough to find in the dark, but it was worth the search, since he was the one with the keys. Pocketing them, putting the pistol away in his hip pocket and the wiped-clean knife back into his boot, Lew permitted the girl’s voice to lead him back to the sixteenth green. As he neared her, he said, “It’s okay, we’re alone now.”

  She gasped, clutching her throat, then made out who it was and said, “They’re gone? They ran away?”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She was suddenly fierce. “Thank you thank you thank you. I hope you made them hurt a lot.”

  Worried, he knelt beside her, touching her shoulder, feeling her vibrate like an overstrained machine. “Take it easy,” he said. “They’re gone now. It’s over.”

  “They killed the man I was going to marry.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

  She folded herself against him, becoming less tense. Was she going to cry? No. “I can’t tell you,” she said, breath warm through his shirt against his chest. “I’m back from the dead, from the worse-than-dead. They were taking me to Jinja Barracks.”

  “Through green sixteen?”

  “They wanted me for themselves first. They wanted me while I was still fresh.”

  “Oh. Yes, I suppose so.”

  She lifted her head, and when her cheek brushed his jaw he was surprised to feel dampness. So there had been a tear—two at the most. This was no Amarda. “You saved me,” she whispered.

  “Triple A is here to help.”

  “Don’t joke,” she murmured, her lips moving lightly against his.

  Not again. “Miss—”

  “Patricia,” she said and kissed him, and he couldn’t not hold her, he had to be aware how alive she was, how good she felt.

  This is impossible, he thought. This is ridiculous, I’m on my way back to Ellen, there’s dead bodies around here like lawn statues, this can’t be happening.

  But it was. After earthquakes people fall into one another’s arms; after ship sinkings, disastrous fires, pitched battles, the survivors reach for one another; after the dragon is slain, the damsel rewards the knight; after the danger, life surges.


  She lowered her head to his shoulder. “I know it’s awful,” she whispered, then looked up again, half erotic and half defiant. “I can’t help it. Terrible things happened, I don’t know how I can feel this way, but I do. I was in Hell, there was no hope, and now I’m back, and I need something warm and friendly inside me.”

  “I’m Lew,” he said.

  73

  “You understand, Mr. Chase,” said the smarter one, Obuong, “we can make no commitment now. There will still have to be a very close investigation.”

  Chase understood a lot more than that. “I welcome an investigation,” he said, smiling his self-confidence. “All I hope for is the opportunity to be of service, to prove my worth to the government and people of Kenya.”

  They stood in a close triumvirate beside the Mercedes, Chase and Charles Obuong and Godfrey Magon. Along the shore four rafts were now moored, their eighty feet of width using up all the available coastline space. The fifth and sixth rafts were even now being lashed to the lakeward edges of the first and second by a squad of soldiers. The remaining soldiers continued to sprawl on the ground, accompanied by a growing number of Balim’s bewildered workmen, who didn’t yet know if they were under arrest. Frank had been given permission to go off in a truck to the general store to make his important phone call, and Balim himself paced nervously back and forth in front of his unfinished hotel, gazing out at the lake, even though he knew his son wasn’t out there.

  As for Chase, he had snatched—he was even now snatching—victory from the jaws of defeat. The most incredible day of his life this had been, ranging all over southern Uganda and now to Kenya, twice captured and in presumably hopeless circumstances, twice surviving to land on his feet. His Mercedes was gone, with the wealth hidden in its door panels. The Angel had failed in its mission about as thoroughly as it was possible to fail. Chase had been bound, beaten, pissed on, insulted, robbed, and betrayed; and yet at the end he would finish on top.